Fort Hancock, Texas ? After a bad day on the job as a Border Patrol agent, Eddie DeLaCruz went home and began discussing with his wife how to celebrate her upcoming birthday. Then he casually pressed his government-issued handgun under his chin and pulled the trigger.

“It was the ugliest sound I ever heard in my life,” his widow, Toni DeLaCruz, recalled of that day last November. “He just collapsed.”

A month later, one of DeLaCruz’s colleagues at the Fort Hancock border post put a bullet through his head, too.

Suicides including these have set off alarm bells throughout the agency responsible for policing the nation’s borders. After nearly four years without a single suicide in their ranks, border agents are killing themselves in greater numbers. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that at least 15 agents have taken their own lives since February 2008 — the largest spike in suicides the agency has seen in at least 20 years.

It’s unclear exactly why the men ended their lives. Few of them left notes. And the Border Patrol seems somewhat at odds with itself over the issue.

Toni DeLaCruz holds up a photo of her late husband, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Eduardo DeLaCruz, at her home in El Paso, Texas. Suicides have set off alarm bells throughout the agency responsible for policing the nation’s borders. After nearly four years without a single suicide in their ranks, border agents are killing themselves in greater numbers.

Agency’s precautions

Federal officials insist the deaths have nothing to do with the agency, which has doubled in size since 2004, or the increasingly volatile U.S.-Mexico border. But administrators have quietly undertaken urgent suicide-prevention initiatives, including special training for supervisors, videos about warning signs and educational programs for 22,000 agents nationwide.

“It’s a microcosm of life,” said Christine Gaugler, head of human resources for Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol. “There’s no uptick. It has nothing to do with our hiring. We are just responding to the suicides that have occurred.”

The agency declined to provide details of the suicides and would only confirm the number of deaths since 2008. But the AP uncovered the names, locations and dates of the suicides by reviewing public records, including those obtained from medical examiners through the Freedom of Information Act, and speaking with federal officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about this issue.

People who had seen the training video also provided the AP a copy of it, along with information about what steps federal officials have taken to address the suicides.

The 17-minute video made earlier this year is part tribute to the dead and part cautionary tale. It implores agents battling depression or stress to ask for help — a candid suggestion for an agency that once forbid agents from appearing in uniform at the funerals of colleagues who killed themselves.

The video was made by the agency’s El Paso sector following at least four suicides among its agents, and it has been embraced by other sectors. In the video, El Paso agent Edmundo Puga Jr. describes getting a call about a suicide.

“At first I get upset, thinking, ‘Not another one,'” Puga said. “Or, ‘Here we go again.'”

All but two of the recent deaths involved agents stationed in Texas, California or Arizona.

Workload decreases

In interviews with the AP, Border Patrol officials and families of the dead agents pointed to both professional and personal reasons.

The job, which starts at about $37,000 a year, has changed dramatically since the hiring surge began. Two years ago, an agent at a busy border station might have processed 150 illegal crossers a day.

But stepped-up border security — including 600 miles of fence and an even larger “virtual” fence that is monitored online — has reduced the number of illegal crossings, as has the economic hardship of the recession.

The result is a job that went from thrilling to downright boring. Agents often spent 12-hour shifts sitting alone in Jeeps and pickups keeping watch for illegal immigrants.

Other Border Patrol agents defend the job as anything but boring. Thane Gallagher, a 13-year veteran of the agency stationed in San Diego, said Monday that the pressures of meticulously documenting and thoroughly questioning every captured immigrant have mounted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even for agents assigned to monitoring posts along the fence, Gallagher said, it’s “not a position that just lends you to sitting there drooling on yourself.”

“If an agent is bored every day at work, that’s a choice they make,” said Gallagher, a union representative in his sector. “There is always work to be done.”

The potential for danger is constant, especially in places where the border has been racked by a bloody drug war in Mexico.

Agents face hostility from many of the people they encounter in the desert. In June, a Border Patrol agent in El Paso shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican boy in the dry bed of the Rio Grande. Authorities said the teen and others were throwing rocks at the agent from the Mexican side while he was trying to arrest illegal immigrants. The incident resulted in a tense standoff between armed federal agents from both Mexico and the U.S.